[Frameworks] experimental documentary

[Bernard Roddy]

(Hi, Matt!  I had to go to Rodeofilms to confirm I know you.)

I've been thinking animation needs to be reconceived, along with writing.  The word animation suggests giving life, an idea with origins in film, where shooting immobile objects or images frame by frame made them appear to be alive.  But film also has this history of intersecting with writing and with text (your billboards, Bill Brown's, so many others').  In addition, digital "new media" introduce moving imagery in ways that have a great deal to do with the experience of reading in an electronic environment.  So, suppose we consider animation's relationship with title cards, for example, or with voiceover - the vocalization of a temporally-based inscription of a thought that might have gone into written form.  The history of electronic writing suggests ways in which new media has transformed what was in film called (drawn) animation, only the source of interest moves into matters of design, layout, font, page, and reader, rather than iconic graphic
 representations modelled on photographic media.  To me Lev Manovich completely overlooks the significance of writing's graphic history to film's history, and this is particularly costly to the temperament of an animator, who can hardly compete with the computer programmer Manovich understands.  If we stay within the realm of 16 mm film, but we use digital tools, we're already in a digital medium when we use a software interface.  At any rate, what strikes me as experimental in "animation" today would be a reconstitution of text and the word, placing emphasis on recording a document, chronicle, journal, diary, confession . . by means of visible language.

Examples of that?  I like THERE THERE SQUARE by Jacqueline Goss.

Bernie
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